Gwyneth Paltrow Biography

Gwyneth Kate Paltrow (33.5-B-25-35) is an Academy Award-, Golden Globe- and double Screen Actors Guild Award-winning American actress. She is married to Coldplay frontman Chris Martin.

Paltrow was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Blythe Danner, an actress, and the late Bruce Paltrow, a film and television director, writer, and producer. Raised in Santa Monica, she attended Crossroads School before moving and attending Spence School, a private girls' school in New York City which was also attended by Emmy Rossum, Kerry Washington and Sally Pressman. Later she briefly studied art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before discontinuing her degree and committing herself to acting.

Paltrow made her professional stage debut in 1990. Her breakthrough film role was starring in the movie Se7en (1995), opposite Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. The film was hugely successful commercially and critically.

She later also starred in Shakespeare in Love, in which she portrayed the fictional love interest of William Shakespeare, portrayed by Joseph Fiennes. It earned more than US$100 million in domestic box office receipts, and received numerous awards. Shakespeare in Love won the Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture-Musical or Comedy and Best Screenplay, as well as the Academy Award for Best Picture. Paltrow also won the award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role from the Screen Actors Guild. Later that year, Paltrow won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

In 2008, she appeared in Iron Man as Pepper Potts, her first blockbuster film in several years. Paltrow told an interviewer that initially she was hesitant to appear in a big blockbuster film, but that she was won over by Robert Downey Jr., the star of the film, and director Jon Favreau. Paltrow recalled a conversation with Downey Jr., saying: "Robert called me and he said, 'This is gonna be fun, and this is gonna be good.' And then he said to me, 'Don't you want to be in a movie that people see?' And I was like, 'Whoa! What would that feel like?' And he's right. Moviemaking is not supposed to be a masturbatory exercise; it's supposed to be shared by other people."